Midwest Zoom (Oct 16th '21 ???)

[Kurgan]

Glad you made it (and survived in RL!). I'm glad the homebrew rules we're using are being implemented piecemeal because it can start to be a lot to keep track of, especially when one is getting tired. Getting in the habit of checking to see if each monster is an elite, keeping track of the extra potions and so forth definitely keeps a Zargon busy! It's a lot of work at a certain point to manage four heroes as well, and really I have to salute iKarith because in our live gaming groups we had each person controlling one at this point. And yes I finally managed to master in-line image placement.

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I found the Heroscribe remix of Prince Magnus' Gold was just aggravating (challenging, but meant to really suck up your time, splitting everybody up to capture each chest individually). It was just too much, so I took the basic original version and just made the extra rooms optional.

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At this stage of the game, there are a lot more traps, and so there were a lot more searches. The NA rules split the two searches into three, but that's something I've always lived with.

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On its face, Quest 4 is fairly easy. Locate the treasure, take it back to the stairs. But like some other quests, when you get to the destination, there isn't much to do except walk home slowly. In the EU edition, this was a temptation for the Heroes, because they had to consider whether it was worth it to patiently make it to the finish line, or "become an outlaw" and keep the gold (for the short term benefit of the extra gold, but missing out on the chance to become a champion and rake in a lot more gold later on). Other than roleplaying the steadfast good guys, there isn't as much motivation to keep rolling 4's all the way to the stairs in the NA edition. Hearing the Dwarf's complaints all the way back to Mentor's place would have been funny, but perhaps too close to method acting.

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So while wanting to tramp through the classic campaign, this one wasn't quite as high as some of the previous mountains we'd climbed together. After the heroes defeated Gulthar and his minions and captured the three chests, we decided to just end it there, fearing the long slog would just be an exercise in boredom. Yes, I would be drawing Evil Wizard Cards, but it was just dragging the thing out.

A better solution, as iKarith suggests, would be similar to my solution with Lair of the Orc Warlord. Put in a few obscure rooms that can be activated as an "alarm" either when you find the final boss or when you grab the treasure, forcing you to flee and fight your way back to the stairs.

Many quests end up as an anti-climax otherwise... Maybe as grown-ups we're too good about clearing rooms methodically? Because that would have been cool when we were kids just rolling dice without worrying and getting a breather gets tedious, so I'll take this feedback into consideration for the future quests. I think there's nothing wrong with having a "part 2" of course, but when we go weeks between games it's nice to also say "we finished it."

Rolling one die to move a chest can be annoying, even if you have spells to get two of them to the finish in fairly decent order, so I can't blame him too much. Our Armory showroom is selling Rallying Horns for future quests.

So while I was a little less than satisfied with the conclusion, it was a still fun game with lots of little moments.

"Twice the Pride, Double the Fall."

We tried out the "Lone Monster" deck. After a first draw where the lone monster gave a "loot" parley another attempt was made later on... a monster offered the "Let's Gamble" parley. At first because of the disastrous (2 red dice) rolls he'd been getting, my opponent controlling the Heroes didn't want to, but then bet 50 gold coins and came out the winner.

Those are my impressions, and I'm taking a week off here but I hope others can see from what we've done that it's very possible to have a live video Hero Quest session/series on a budget (even without using TTS or Vassal). True, many more of us are being vaccinated and probably will be spending more time with our in person groups, but that doesn't change the fact that we at the Inn want to hang out, and hopefully more opportunities like that will be taken advantage of.

Thanks for playing, see you next game!

[iKarith]

This one was a quite a slog. The roll to move rule showed its weakness here as it took about three hours for us to get to the treasure. Now, I've come to presume that it takes us about twice as long to get something done as it might take normal people because we're constantly making nerd references and acting out our parts. Not really role-playing in the traditional sense, just these heroes have developed a sort of personality and we both play it out.

I'll use my brode sode!
Hey, that's supposed to be my line!

The problem was, I kept rolling fours and fives ON TWO DICE for movement!

This quest didn't have a lot of challenge—it doesn't have a lot of challenge for heroes starting out, and mine have an extra quest under their belts and are quite well equipped at this point. The barbarian got stuck behind the other heroes and so he was holding back quite unintentionally, so he NEVER took damage, the whole quest. (He did plow through some spear traps planning to just tank the damage if hit, but he wasn't… I could've and should've detected traps, but by the time we got there I was like LET'S GET ON WITH IT!

I think I'd restructure this one quite a bit. Less about just a long slog through the entirety of the board and more intending to make the trip out just a bit more perilous.

There WERE a few monsters we didn't find in hidden rooms in Kurgan's modified map, and he'd have gotten to release them if we'd have slogged all the way out. But unless they came at us all at once, they'd have been no challenge, and they wouldn't have been able to come at us all at once. We concluded it would've taken another couple of hours assuming an average roll of 4 (and honestly I was NOT rolling that well on my movements), so we just called it there.

That's the first time we've done that. A lot of players get to the objective and have killed everything in sight, and they call it good. But we play with a threat mechanic that allows for wandering monsters, doors we didn't open to release monsters we didn't know about, etc., so I've always said before let's play it out and see what happens. This time … no, let's not.

I probably sounded frustrated. I was tired and that likely didn't help.

[Kurgan]

It's quite all right and I don't mean to sound overly negative either, I did have a good time and I'm always open to constructive feedback!

But it could have been better and I'll work on it a bit more next time. Not every quest is equally great at all times. I think though even if we had "stayed on target" and had no homebrew rules, it still would have had that weakness, of being just a lot of empty rolling at the end. There is no challenge here once you've killed all the monsters and grabbed the chests. Without rolling to move, how would you handle it? Just say everyone can move 12 squares, or just move everyone to the stairs automatically? (I don't quite understand what people say when they say "roll to move sucks" what they want instead).

The Heroscribe remix (that I opted not to use) essentially made the quest take 2-3 times longer by hiding each chest in a different room under heavy guard although one happened to be fairly close, within a couple of rooms of the exit), which while cool, would have possibly made it seem even more frustrating in terms of length.

It's true that some parts of the game are just telling a story and having fun, not necessarily balancing certain death on the edge of a knife with only a dice roll between you and failure. And when it's not fun, there's stuff we can do to try to help that, but I try not to just make it seem purely arbitrary (whether for victory or defeat).

Adding more monsters would have made it a little less boring to move to the end but wouldn't shorten the time it took. Even if I had allowed 2 dice movement to the end, bad rolls would still have made it take awhile, as you pointed out.

Of course another issue with quests feeling long and so forth can have to do with it being only two people. Others in a group can get distracted but in my experience tend to keep each other on track, and its much easier for one person to manage one Hero than one person manage four and trying to coordinate them over a vast quest (not that it can't be done, but its harder). Anyone who prefers the simplicity of HQ can see the issue here, as opposed to those who prefer it to be made much more complex.

I could have said "okay for now every character gets 6 movement per turn." I haven't yet tried to say that people get fixed movement during a game or in certain circumstances. I know some prefer to play this way. I guess it just feels weird. Another tactic would be just to say "okay, everybody gets +2 movement because you're fleeing the reinforcements." With the caveat that if everybody suddenly decides to stand and fight, they don't get the bonus. Maybe that is a good solution? Or buy a couple of Rallying Horns to give people bonus dice movement for situations like this (and any extra monsters just become more reason to run, run, run!).

Then again when we play I could open with the question:

Do you have time for a long quest that will be a two parter, or would you like one we can reasonably complete in a 2 hour session?

I've played some solo quests that can be completed in 45 minutes. Granted, modifications need to be made to take a quest that normally is built with 4 characters in mind for less than that but still possible, I've done it with good results.

[Kurgan]

Some old quests just need a little fine tuning... !

[iKarith]

It's quite all right and I don't mean to sound overly negative either, I did have a good time and I'm always open to constructive feedback!

But it could have been better and I'll work on it a bit more next time. Not every quest is equally great at all times. I think though even if we had "stayed on target" and had no homebrew rules, it still would have had that weakness, of being just a lot of empty rolling at the end. There is no challenge here once you've killed all the monsters and grabbed the chests. Without rolling to move, how would you handle it? Just say everyone can move 12 squares, or just move everyone to the stairs automatically? (I don't quite understand what people say when they say "roll to move sucks" what they want instead).

I think this quest just has a weakness that it's designed to be slow.

I think when people have changed the 2d6 roll-to-move, they've usually either given people a fixed movement or a fixed + random movement. I'm not sure either of those would help this quest particular quest not feel like a slog—as you said, this quest has you kill most of the monsters on the way in, and then what? It's just a very slow walk out.

Playing it vanilla wouldn't have helped it. since the homebrew didn't add much to this quest. Part of that was your rolls were about as successful as mine—TWO of your monsters were elite I think. But even if they were, it just would've made combat take longer.

Y'know what might help this one is if the chests were easy to get to, and then you had to fight your way through most of those monsters to get them out. Maybe the chests are two rooms in, but once the players try to move a chest, a scripted cave-in blocks the way back to the stairs. Now you've gotta go through the rest of the gauntlet with the chests (not so much with walking the perimeter of the board, but room to room) to get them out.

The Heroscribe remix (that I opted not to use) essentially made the quest take 2-3 times longer by hiding each chest in a different room under heavy guard although one happened to be fairly close, within a couple of rooms of the exit), which while cool, would have possibly made it seem even more frustrating in terms of length.

It's true that some parts of the game are just telling a story and having fun, not necessarily balancing certain death on the edge of a knife with only a dice roll between you and failure. And when it's not fun, there's stuff we can do to try to help that, but I try not to just make it seem purely arbitrary (whether for victory or defeat).

Adding more monsters would have made it a little less boring to move to the end but wouldn't shorten the time it took. Even if I had allowed 2 dice movement to the end, bad rolls would still have made it take awhile, as you pointed out.

I like the story stuff. Actually, while I responded to some criticism in another thread about this game "being designed for children" regarding the opposed-successes game mechanic used for combat, this quest may actually be an example of that. If it was supposed to take a couple of hours to play this quest with everybody moving along. The Guerilla Miniatures playthrough of this quest took an hour without any of our homebrew (and getting a few rules wrong which were probably a wash where some sped things up and others slowed them down. Except, they just skipped the backtrack entirely since, "you guys already found everything there is to find…"

So yeah, a couple of hours. Maybe in the early 90s, kids had that kind of time. But I bet even in the 90s a lot of kids decided that it wasn't fun to just role a piddly 1-6 per turn with the evil wizard having NOTHING to do and the players having almost nothing, for 30+ turns.

Of course another issue with quests feeling long and so forth can have to do with it being only two people. Others in a group can get distracted but in my experience tend to keep each other on track, and its much easier for one person to manage one Hero than one person manage four and trying to coordinate them over a vast quest (not that it can't be done, but its harder). Anyone who prefers the simplicity of HQ can see the issue here, as opposed to those who prefer it to be made much more complex.

I could have said "okay for now every character gets 6 movement per turn." I haven't yet tried to say that people get fixed movement during a game or in certain circumstances. I know some prefer to play this way. I guess it just feels weird. Another tactic would be just to say "okay, everybody gets +2 movement because you're fleeing the reinforcements." With the caveat that if everybody suddenly decides to stand and fight, they don't get the bonus. Maybe that is a good solution? Or buy a couple of Rallying Horns to give people bonus dice movement for situations like this (and any extra monsters just become more reason to run, run, run!).

Then again when we play I could open with the question:

Do you have time for a long quest that will be a two parter, or would you like one we can reasonably complete in a 2 hour session?

I've played some solo quests that can be completed in 45 minutes. Granted, modifications need to be made to take a quest that normally is built with 4 characters in mind for less than that but still possible, I've done it with good results.

There are possibly some times things would've gone faster if turn order were not maintained, but that might've cut 15 minutes off the time for this quest, total? Might've had the Barbarian getting his hands dirty. I think we also lose a little time for the zoom-related stuff, adjusting cameras, fiddling with angles, visibility, double-checking things, making sure stuff is in frame, etc.

I'm usually good for two-part quests when they're long and we don't have as much time. I'm also usually good for quests that take a little longer, like The Trial, when there's something to them. This one just didn't have anything to it for basically the second half of the quest … and my rolls made the first half SLOOOOOOW. But we might want to check on that before getting started especially if we drag other vict—er, glorious, heroic players into the game.

[Kurgan]

I made some adjustments and I think this new version of the quest will be much better. When we get together next I'll be happy to show you what I came up with! I think it will be a rewarding experience...

I also went back and revised a few of the other quests with the reinforcements mechanic (hidden rooms can be activated for more monsters when certain conditions met... inspired by the pc classic DooM!).

[iKarith]

So … a lot of mobs firing slow-moving projectiles which would be easy to dodge except for the fact there's five of them shooting at once and you had best learn how to circle strafe if you don't want to get hit in the face with a couple of fireballs?

Given the setting, this might be more like the other classic Id Software title … WooD.





(sounds like fun!)

[Kurgan]

Ha! I was more thinking of how you wander around in a familiar area and yes we know about the "huge crowd spawns in" but there are several times where a tiny little trigger opens a door and a bunch of demons start roaming around behind you in the dark...

[iKarith]

Ha! I was more thinking of how you wander around in a familiar area and yes we know about the "huge crowd spawns in" but there are several times where a tiny little trigger opens a door and a bunch of demons start roaming around behind you in the dark...

Yup, often in the room with you, but since Doom levels have so much backtracking … not always.

Actually, something else that might be interesting to learn from is the sort of complication triggers that come with adventures designed using Index Card RPG, a sort of supplement/addition/replacement for some D&D mechanics aimed at Get On With It™, basically.

First, each area (room, generally) has a designated difficulty rating. For anything you'd normally roll for, it's the base for a character to do it on a d20. Bonuses/penalties, your level, etc. factor in, but much more quickly because the DM already knows what the base is. Anything within the realm of possibility (or near enough if it would be really cool, story-wise) is possible.

However, once players come upon something, it'll often have a "complication". In some generally variable amount of time (d4 or d6 or something rounds), something will happen that makes things more complex. Not necessarily "harder" in terms of difficulty of the room for rolls.

For example, if you go into an orc band's home turf, the passage may split. If you take one path, you'll come across a guard room. Whatever you do with the guards, fight them, knock them out, bribe them, whatever … if you're still there or like peering through the door or something in d4 rounds, a few more orcs will show up. If you're outside, they're coming up behind you. This is built in to the adventure, so those orcs came from somewhere else. The dining area, maybe—the adventure's designer would determine that. If you go where they were, they won't be there any more. If you didn't go to the guard room, or if you came and went before that could happen, you'll find them as you dig deeper, but maybe at a time of your choosing instead of theirs, and maybe under better circumstances.

But let's say you sneak past the guard room and take the other path. Better search for traps! Set it off instead and you'll alert both the orcs up ahead of you and the ones in the guard room to your presence, because you're gonna set off an alarm. If they're all dead, it won't matter, of course, but if you might otherwise have gotten the drop on any of them, that won't be happening now!

Let's say you were cautious and disarmed it though, and because you didn't likely spend much time there (or because none was defined) there weren't any complications. You've managed to avoid combat thus far, but D&D-wise you're still gaining experience.

You come across the dining area. Those other orcs are here. It's loud in here, between the cook fires, the sound of pots as someone's preparing a meal, the orcs sitting around drinking. It's a space full of tables and other things, meant also as a meeting room for everyone in the band and it's only got a few orcs in it now who are occupied—maybe playing Heroes and Humans?

#1 I roll 20!
#2 That not how things work. Human with gold hat not give you stone house because you roll 20!

Either way, the difficulty here is a lot lower, you could take these orcs out here a lot easier than you could have in the guard room.

But again let's say you avoid combat. Safer, but there are things you can do that will send orcs running after you still. But let's say you get lucky and head right to the boss fight. Oh, no escaping it, there's gonna be a boss fight. The Chaos Warrior who stole Prince Magnus's gold is here, as are some henchmen, and treasure as well, including the gold, some barrels of blasting powder, and a few other treasures. And the room's got several lamps lit, so the moment you open that door, everyone inside will see that what comes in is not an orc, and they will fight you.

This room has a difficulty and modifiers to maybe make the minions easier or harder than the boss, and it has complications too. In a few rounds, some mercs will show up. And they want the prince's reward. You know them, they've been a PITA for several adventures now. Through pigheaded stupidity or because they've decided they want the reward and they don't care how they get it (hard to say, but the former is more likely), they're convinced you're working with the Chaos Warrior, and the fact you're trying to kill him doesn't dissuade the group's leader of this.

So now you've got three factions fighting! And after several rounds, if any mercs are still standing, one of them (ideally the pompous leader) will knock over a lantern which will break, spilling oil on the floor and causing a small fire. A fire which will in … complication … rounds, reach the blasting powder. Because of course it will!

It's not hard to put the fire out. It just requires someone to go over there and spend an action to stamp it out. Except these mercs didn't notice the blasting powder, and should have conveniently maneuvered into the way before it happens and none of them are going to worry about a little burning lamp oil on a stone cavern floor! Turn around? What kind of idiot do you take them for? You've got a couple rounds, but maybe only three to six, before the oil reaches the barrels and they explode, taking everyone with them.

And this time the DM tells the players about how many rounds they have. Even odds it blows that round or the next one. Either way, if someone, hero or fiend, doesn't get past these idiots and put out the fire, it's game over. Maybe the wizard will cast a spell at the fire to wash, away or smother the fire, or make it burn faster to use up the oil before it can spread to the barrels? It's not supposed to be hard to put out, just to create cinematic tension, so if the wizard has any plausible explanation for how his spell can work in the moment, totally go for it dude!

Whoever is still alive after the fire's dealt with can fight over the gold!

What about the orcs in the dining area, the guard room, and anywhere else you left them unfound or otherwise somehow alive? Assuming you've killed everyone in the boss room, what about them? If there were any who could interfere, you could threaten them, or bribe them, or whatever. Fair enough to call it over when the boss fight is over—you return to town, a long-hated rival band of not-exactly heroes have finally been dealt with, the prince has his gold back, the heroes get a bit of a reward for their trouble, and maybe some orcs have a bit of spending money from their boss's horde. They've also got a few barrels of blasting powder. Hope they use that for merriment instead of mischief! (Defend the town adventure in the future?)

There's probably some ideas in there for a Quest designer. Scenario stolen from memory of a YouTube video … I'll dig it up if someone's interested.

[Kurgan]

Another old timey video game convention is that the minions basically keep re-spawning forever until the boss is defeated, and then they all just keel over/flee.

A version of this was implemented in certain official quests (especially in the EU editions), come to think of it.

Lots of ways to keep the difficulty going, but I think this will work as a simple solution without getting boring. The reserves don't have to be used but they're there if needed and its still limited. The best way to force the heroes to flee is to make them ALL elites (great way to kill weaker heroes too).

The "room full of guys waiting to pounce when needed" solution I have going has a couple of weaknesses... as in "what if the Heroes find it first and clear it out?" but that is solved simply by making the secret door only trigger-able by the event, rather than a player search. Then again if some crazy Hero passed through rock and finds them (like a Doom player Noclipping around the map to find the last monster), then he's welcome to the fight, I say!

I see I'm now an Ice Gremlin. Shouldn't have eaten those snoball cakes after midnight!